AIT: Highlighting Variants

This post describes how I use highlighting and release states in Author-It to make reviewing documents easier. This procedure assumes that you have a main book along with another book that uses variants of the objects in the main book. The variants are either variant topics or embedded variant topics. 

By using this procedure, the reviewer can review one complete document, and then just review the highlighted sections in the second document.

Setup

1. Open AIT Administrator
2. Select Security -> Release States
3. Add a new state:

a. Right click -> Add State
b. State name: HighlightVar
c. Right click over the new state, select Check Row
d. Click the box near the end of the row for HighlightVar / Review Color
e. Select yellow
f. Check that the boxes are checked for all relevant users

4. Do step 3 again to add the state DoNotHighlightVar, but skip steps d and e.

5. Close AIT Administrator
6. Open AIT
7. In your library, sort the objects by variant
8. Select (using Ctrl+click) all variants of the default object
9. Right mouse click, then select Change Release State -> HighlightVar

The variant of the main document can now be published with highlighted sections.

Print Without Highlighting

1. Go to the search tab
2. Select HighlightVar from In State
3. Click on Find Now
4. The search result shows all of the objects with highlighting
5. Select all of the objects
6. Right click -> Change Release State -> DoNoHighlightVar
7. Publish

Print with Highlighting
1. Go to the search tab
2. Select DoNoHighlightVar from In State
3. Click on Find Now
4. The search result shows all of the objects with highlighting
5. Select all of the objects
6. Right click -> Change Release State -> HighlightVar
7. Publish

Thanks to Miriam Lottner at Tech-Tav for pointing me in the right direction.